When someone comes up with an excellent idea or design for the use of a public place, it can put government’s in a quandary. On one hand, governments should encourage innovation. On the other hand, they should deal with public assets openly.
This was the quandary faced by the ACT Government when a proposal was put to it to redevelop the Griffin Centre and the adjacent carpark, most of which is public land. No-one with bright ideas will put them to government if they fear their ideas will be expropriated and put out to the highest tender. No-one will work on developing an idea if it might be lost to others. But if the originator of the idea is to get exclusive development rights, other developers will rightly ask why couldn’t they put a bid in.
How is this quandary to be solved. In the case of the Civic development the ACT Government is considering a joint venture. It is the wrong response to this proposal. There seems to be very little public merit in giving one developer exclusivity in return for the development idea. This is because the idea is not very exceptional or innovative. The value of the innovation is not that great that any developer given half a chance couldn’t come up with something similar. And this is the very point. No other developer has been given half a chance. If the Government thought it worth developing that part of town, it should have invited expressions of interest, a design competition and ultimately tenders.
It would be more likely that that process would yield more innovation and design excellence than what has happened.
One developer had an idea to develop a public asset. There was nothing in the idea so compellingly innovative that warranted all the secrecy — a couple new streets, a hotel or two, some shop fronts, and so on. Nothing out of the ordinary.
This most-favoured-developer method is not the best way to develop the city. Even on its merits it suffers two major pitfalls. The first it that it requires the demolition of several quite useful assets, like the Griffin centre and the skateboard rink. That seems very silly when there is ample spare space in Civic which could be developed without demolition. The second pitfall is that Canberra is already hopelessly over-supplied with retail space. That can only get worse with the Government’s foolish determination to go ahead with a shopping mall in Manuka and extensions to two other malls.
The only advantage to the new Civic plan is that it proposes strip shop development and some mixed residential development rather than perpetuating earlier planning failures with malls. Mall developments, like Belconnen, separate residences, shops and offices thereby creating rotating empty unused places for parts of the day or week.
Mall ownership often precludes strata titling which enables small business to buy the head lease over their premises. With malls small business is often beholden to large out-of-town corporations who can jack up rents in a way that expropriates the small business person’s success. Or worse, force them out so that they lose virtually all their business goodwill which is so often location-based.
The Government should stop retail development ad-hocery. It should work out a way of over-coming the problem of the glut of retail space rather than adding to the problem with developer-driven projects based on the conversion of public assets.